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Early Career Consequences of Temporary Employment in Germany and the UK
Abstract
This article investigates the effects of temporary employment at labour market entry on subsequent individual careers, drawing on data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) from the period 199 I to 2007. The results show that German temporarily employed entrants suffer from higher initial wage penalties and risks of temporary employment cycles but that all differences compared to entrants with permanent contracts diminish after five years. The integration scenario works more effectively in the UK, where disadvantages are less pronounced and employment losses are primarily related to further education. Moreover; these tendencies vary by education groups and gender Disadvantages of initial temporary employment are weaker for women in Germany while gender differences in the UK apparently have less impact. Across borders, temporary contracts are associated with greater initial but vanishing wage penalties and temporary employment cycles for tertiary graduates.
... The integration scenario postulates that initial contractual instability or underutilization of acquired skills represents the necessary probation steps to ensure adequate productivity levels before longer-term employment relationships occur (Wang & 1998; Giesecke & Groß, 2004). Screening costs, especially high in the case of a non-optimal match in highly skilled and rewarding occupations, are thus left entirely to the employee and compensated by the promise of stable and rewarding trajectories (Gebel, 2010). On the other hand, the entrapment scenario posits the existence of a two-tiered labor market that separates a primary segment, which offers secure jobs, correct skill match and training opportunities, better remuneration, and upward mobility chances, from a (smaller) secondary segment characterized by temporary, low-paid, and inconsistent work trajectories (Barbieri, 2009). ...
... Indeed, the distinction between the integration and entrapment scenarios often follows existing skill divides (Giesecke & Groß, 2004;Olsthoorn, 2016). Flexible contracts for highly educated individuals applying for highly skilled jobs are often a screening device or a choice (De Jong et al., 2009;Gebel, 2010). Initial insecurity and wage penalties (with respect to more stable entrants) are quickly recovered if the screening phase is successful. ...
... Contrary to the expected entrapment scenario, these initial works demonstrated that non-standard work arrangements for new entrants did not entail long-lasting penalties and, in some contexts, served as an entry port for permanent employment (Scherer, 2004 for Italy with entrapment only in the short-term, and entry port in Germany and the UK; Steijn et al., 2006 for the Netherlands;Gash, 2008 for France, Germany, the UK, and Denmark). More recently, Gebel (2010) documented that labor market entrants with fixed-term contracts in Germany typically obtained permanent positions and overcame initial disadvantages in around five years (as in McGinnity et al., 2005), while this is even faster in the UK. In contrast to job search theory, which states that young workers accept progressively less attractive jobs after unsuccessful search periods, Gebel (2010) found that the probability of taking up a fixed-term contract decreases much more than for a permanent contract. ...
... However, results from cross-sectional studies might be biased as they cannot account for unobserved confounders. Other studies, utilizing panel data to investigate the development of wage gaps over time, reveal that initial wage gaps between contract types disappear some years after the start of the temporary contract (Gebel, 2010;Pavlopoulos, 2013). Moreover, some panel studies that consider more holistic career dynamics reveal strong wage growth for former temporary workers after they make transitions to permanent employment (Booth et al., 2002;Reichenberg & Berglund, 2019). ...
... These findings are often interpreted as support for the assumption that temporary jobs can function as a prolonged probationary period and screening device for permanent jobs. After successful screening, workers are compensated for their initial wage disadvantages, making the cost of temporary employment only transitory (Booth et al., 2002;Gebel, 2010;Wang & Weiss, 1998). ...
... Such differences in institutional settings might moderate individuallevel wage dynamics associated with job transitions of former temporary workers (Arranz et al., 2021). Wage disadvantages of temporary jobs are found in most countries (Fauser & Gebel, 2023) but they are usually less pronounced in liberal labour markets (Fuller & Stecy-Hildebrandt, 2015;Gebel, 2010;Giesecke & Groß, 2004). ...
... Traditionally, Germany represents a conservative welfare state with a strong degree of familialism (Esping-Andersen 1999;Leitner 2003). Unified Germany had strict labour market regulations and a generous social insurance-based welfare model with strong social protections for the unemployed and lower socio-economic groups (Esping-Andersen 1990;Gebel 2010). In this context, German households have been relatively secure in economic terms. ...
... In contrast, the UK represents a liberal welfare state with a residual (noninterventionist) welfare policy, reflected by limited labour market regulation and modest income support for disadvantaged groups (Esping-Andersen 1999;Gebel 2010). In this context, family policy is also liberal because parental leave is comparatively modest, and childcare for young children is largely provided by parttime day-care or by family members and relatives (Esping-Andersen 1999;Thévenon 2011;Ciccia/Bleijenbergh 2014;Banister/Kerrane 2024). ...
In recent decades, fluctuating unemployment rates and welfare state retrenchment have led to increased levels of economic insecurity in some countries. At the same time, cultural norms and family policies have become more gender-egalitarian. While earlier research related these trends to the decline in the male breadwinner model, little is known about whether recent cohorts who entered adult life against the backdrop of a new socioeconomic opportunity structure have established new configurations of household labour supply. Using sequence analysis and cluster analyses across harmonised longitudinal data (GSOEP, BHPS and Understanding Society) for a sample of adults born between 1961 and 1973 in Germany and the United Kingdom (UK), this study introduces an innovative indicator of household labour supply types and new descriptive findings on the cohort replacement of household labour supply in these two countries. Descriptive findings show that recent cohorts in both Germany and the UK are forming more gender-egalitarian households, as reflected by the decline in the male breadwinner model as well as by the rise of 1.5-male breadwinner households in Germany and dual-earner households in the UK. However, the proportion of single and low labour intensity households in recent cohorts has declined in the UK, while there has been no meaningful change in East Germany and a strong increase in West Germany. The evolution of household labour supply types can be attributed to the replacement of cohorts who entered adulthood and established their households under shifting socioeconomic contexts and gender ideologies.
... In Canada, Fuller and Stecy-Hildebrandt (2014), using panel data for a representative sample of workers, show that temporary workers experience large initial wage penalties that decrease only slowly but remain significant over their five-year observation window, with differences being more pronounced for women. Conversely, Gebel (2010) finds that in the UK and Germany, initial wage gaps between temporary and permanent workers are weaker for women than for men and disappear for both genders about 4 years after entering the labor market. Another strand of literature, which is more relevant to our study, leverages panel data to examine within-worker wage trajectories. ...
... Furthermore, previous studies have mostly looked at single spells or transitions during a worker's career and very few studies have been able to address initial conditions bias, where observed wage differentials may be owing to pre-existing unobserved differences in previous employment experiences. We address these issues by focusing on career entrants, allowing us to avoid biases stemming from unobserved past work experiences (Eberlein et al., 2024;Gebel, 2010). ...
Using data from the Australian Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey (2001–2020), we examine how combined patterns of non-standard employment and underemployment in the early career shape later wage trajectories, paying careful attention to gender differences on a representative sample of Australian young men (N = 470) and women (N = 497). By combining multichannel sequence analysis and random effects panel models, we make three central findings. First, we identify seven distinct early employment trajectories, with the “standard” career, characterized by stable, full-time permanent jobs in the first 5 years post-education, being the most prevalent. Second, we find that combined patterns of non-standard employment and underemployment during early careers are associated with significant wage penalties. However, these wage penalties diminish within 10 years. Third, enduring and widening wage disparities are found only among youth primarily unemployed or inactive early in their careers. These penalties are particularly pronounced among men, underscoring the influence of the “ideal” worker norm. Overall, integrating underemployed jobseekers into the workforce and addressing gender-based biases should be a priority for policymakers to ensure equal opportunities and fair treatment for all workers in the labor market.
... The literature on selection mechanisms into different lengths of maternity leave has identified several drivers, including opportunity costs, negative health selection, and mothering ideology. Opportunity costs can be monetary and non-monetary (Gebel, 2010;McIntosh et al., 2012). Monetary opportunity costs include wages lost for the time taken off work for maternity leave (Barnes, 2014;Spiess & Wrohlich, 2008). ...
... Monetary opportunity costs include wages lost for the time taken off work for maternity leave (Barnes, 2014;Spiess & Wrohlich, 2008). Non-monetary opportunity costs include foregone career opportunities or professional disadvantages suffered due to absence from work (Gebel, 2010;McIntosh et al., 2012). These monetary and non-monetary systematic disadvantages mothers experience have been referred to collectively as the motherhood penalty (see Collins, 2020 andGuzzo &Hayford, 2020 for review). ...
Existing literature shows the importance of maternity leave as a strategy for women to balance work and family responsibilities. However, only a few studies focused on the long-run impact of maternity leave length on maternal health. Therefore, how exactly they are related remains unclear. We examine women’s selection into different lengths of maternity leave as a potential explanation for the inconclusive findings in the literature on the association between maternity leave and maternal health. This study aims to unravel the association between maternity leave length and mothers’ long-term health in Germany. Drawing on detailed data from the German Statutory Pension Fund (DRV), we estimated the association between maternity leave length and sick leave from 3 years following their child’s birth for 4,243 women living in Germany in 2015 by applying discrete-time logistic regression. Our results show a negative relationship between maternity-leave length and long-term maternal health, likely driven by negative health selection. Long maternity leaves of more than 24 months were associated with worse maternal health in the long run, while a positive association emerged for vulnerable women with pre-existing health problems.
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 03:24:08PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:20:32PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:20:17PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:20:17PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:26:21PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:20:22PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:26:27PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:26:53PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:30:50PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:15:31PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:40:55PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:10:12PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:30:21PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:11:55PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:09:10PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:11:55PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 12:59:37PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 12:59:32PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 12:59:51PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 12:59:49PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 01:11:55PM via free access ...
... This situation has caused much public anger in the context of tight labor markets and the substitute of permanent jobs with such intermittent work-experience opportunities, especially penalizing fresh university graduates with fresh academic knowledge by not remunerating them, making them experience serial internships, as the critics of 'Generation Praktikum' have claimed (Deutscher Bundestag, 2007;Stolz, 2005). Research on precarious career trajectories of university graduates has shown similar patterns for Britain, the US, Australia, and Japan (Gebel, 2010;Vallas, 2015). ...
... Such impressions are particularly relevant to younger festival workers who increasingly lack familiarity with the standard employment relationship. This creates challenges for labormarket entry studies that need to determine what to count in and what out (e.g., holiday jobs, internships)(Gebel, 2010). Ann Vogel -978-90-04-52396-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/09/2023 12:59:28PM via free access ...
... Theo Rosen [12], người lao động với hợp đồng tạm thời nên nhận mức lương cao hơn như một hình thức "bồi thường" cho điều kiện công việc kém ổn định hơn. Tuy nhiên, hầu hết các nghiên cứu thực nghiệm ở nhiều quốc gia đều phát hiện rằng công nhân với hợp đồng tạm thời thường nhận mức lương thấp hơn thay vì lương cao hơn nhóm có hợp đồng lâu dài [13][14][15][16]. Theo các nghiên cứu này, mức lương thấp hơn mà công nhân với hợp đồng lao động tạm thời nhận được có thể là do họ có ít quyền đàm phán, ít cơ hội đào tạo và năng suất lao động thấp hơn, cũng như kỳ vọng chuyển đổi sang hợp đồng lâu dài có lương cao hơn trong tương lai [17]. ...
This paper examines the impact of social insurance, labor contracts and education-job on wages among graduates in the fields of teacher education and educational science in Vietnam. It uses data from the Labour Force Survey conducted between 2018 and 2020. Regression analysis reveals that, among graduates in matched jobs, those with social insurance earn higher average wages than those without. Similarly, graduates with permanent labor contracts earn higher average wages than those without. However, among those with social insurance or permanent labor contracts, graduates in mismatched jobs earn higher average wages than those in matched jobs. These findings suggest that having social insurance and permanent labor contracts is key to securing higher wages for graduates. Additionally, the wage premium associated with job mismatch suggests that graduates may self-select into mismatched jobs offering higher pay, due in part to the relatively low wages in Vietnam’s education sector.
... Even in countries with generous welfare provisions, social insurance for the unemployed cannot entirely offset their losses of earnings (Gallie & Paugam, 2000). Among the employed, temporary employees have lower bargaining power over their wages and benefits (Gebel, 2010). Employers also have fewer incentives to provide on-the-job training for temporary workers (Forrier & Sels, 2003). ...
Rising employment uncertainty featured by higher risks of being temporarily employed or unemployed is often seen as the driving force behind delayed and declined partnering in Western countries. However, such an employment–partnering relationship is contextualized by labour market institutions and thus could diverge across countries over time. This paper aims to investigate how country-level variations in labour market regulations moderate individual-level effects of unstable employment on union formation, including the transitions into marriage or cohabitation unions. Using comparative panel data for 26 countries from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (the years 2010–2019), our multilevel fixed effects models showed that temporary employment and unemployment negatively affected the probability of union formation for single women and men in Europe. Moreover, the negative relationship between unstable employment and union formation was reinforced when labour market reforms were stimulating insider–outsider segregations or decreasing welfare provisions. Specifically, stricter employment protection legislations and higher coverage rates of collective bargaining agreements could reinforce the negative effects of temporary employment and unemployment on union formation, while more generous provisions of unemployment benefits could buffer such negative effects.
... We can conclude from descriptive evidence for Germany that sequences which start in permanent employment generate the lowest values of CNPI, whereas sequences starting in non-employment are related to high precarity levels. The "penalty" to the fixed-term contract, while visible, is not very large, which is also consistent with findings pointing to the mixed career effects of fixed-term employment on the German labor market (Gebel, 2010). We obtain a very similar picture for the USA. ...
In this article, we introduce a methodology to measure employment precarity in cross-country research based on individual career data from national panel surveys. First, we propose a measure of employment precarity, which is comparable across countries differing in their institutions, legal regulations and practices concerning the organization of labor relations. To address the comparability issues raised by using fixed-term employment indicators in the study of employment disadvantage, we conceptualize employment precarity in terms of sequences of labor market experiences, which carry a universal meaning as indicators of labor market attachment: non-employment, low income from work, and job separations. Drawing on recent developments in the field of sequence-based indices, we develop a Cross-National Precarity Index (CNPI) and test its performance using data on employment biographies from the German Socio-Economic Panel. We confirm good construct validity of the proposed measure by comparing its distribution across subpopulations as well as by assessing the statistical association between the index and typical correlates of precarious employment identified in the literature: employment status and life satisfaction. Second, we outline a methodological framework for the ex-post harmonization of career data gathered in various types of individual panel studies. Acknowledging the methodological differences between these studies, we propose adopting a common, calendar-based format for longitudinal data organization and constructing harmonization control variables to account for the recall and measurement bias resulting from the specific methodological solutions adopted in domestic surveys.
... Reflecting the increased flexibility in the labour market, Europe has seen a growing share of temporary contracts in several countries, with temporary employment being highly prevalent among young workers (Gallie, 2017). There is an ongoing debate about the prospects and pitfalls of fixed-term contracts and casual jobs for young workers (for example, Baranowska et al., 2011;Booth et al., 2002;Gash, 2008;Gebel, 2010;McVicar et al., 2019). From a life course perspective, short-term contracts can be interspersed with spells of unemployment and the succession of such contracts can lead to precarious careers (Mattijssen and Pavlopoulos, 2019). ...
... We assume that children's need of material support decreases more strongly for transitions from education or NEET to full-time permanent work than for transitions to non-standard work because full-time permanent work usually generates the highest financial returns. With the exception of compensating wage differential theory (Abowd and Ashenfelter, 1981), theoretical predictions and empirical research point to a wage premium for permanent contracts compared to temporary contracts with predefined limited duration (Gebel, 2010). Part-time work pays less because of the shorter working time. ...
Research has shown that parents provide considerable support to their children; however, we know little about the influence of young adults’ employment experiences on the support they receive from their parents. We draw on data from the German Family Panel pairfam for birth cohorts 1981–1983 and 1991–1993 and use a first difference panel estimator with asymmetric effects to examine the extent to which young adults’ employment transitions affect material, emotional, and instrumental support from parents. We find stark differences across types of support: parental material support changes in response to transitions in and out of employment, especially when to and from education. Other types of support seem less contingent on labour market transitions. Instrumental support only increases for transitions from education to employment and from employment to NEET. The latter effect is mainly driven by women entering parental leave. We do not find strong evidence of differences between transitions to standard and non-standard work. The association between employment transitions and intergenerational material support flows suggests that families act as safety nets, raising concerns about those whose families are unable to help.
... Whether they constitute "stepping stones" or "traps" may crucially depend on the specific labour market group (Boschman et al., 2021;Knabe & Plum, 2013;Scherer, 2004) or country context (Clark & Kanellopoulos, 2013;Lucifora et al., 2005). This article adds to this debate by highlighting the social ties to higher educated co-workers, which has been indicated as an important factor contributing to the overall rise in earnings inequality (Clark & Kanellopoulos, 2013;Gebel, 2010;Lucifora et al., 2005;Scherer, 2004). ...
Low-wage jobs are often regarded as dead ends in the labour market careers of young people. Previous research focused on disentangling to what degree the association between a low-wage job at the start of working life and limited chances of transitioning to better-paid employment is causal or spurious. Less attention has been paid to the factors that may facilitate the upward wage mobility of low-wage workers. We focus on such mechanisms, and we scrutinize the impact of social ties to higher-educated co-workers. Due to knowledge spillovers, job referrals, as well as firm-level productivity gains, having higher-educated co-workers may improve an individual’s chances of transitioning to a better-paid job. We use linked employer-employee data from longitudinal Swedish registers and panel data models that incorporate measures of low-wage workers’ social ties to higher-educated co-workers. Our results confirm that having social ties to higher-educated co-workers increases individual chances of transitioning to better-paid employment.
... Solving this conundrum, Alon and Tienda (2005) demonstrate that this relationship follows a curvilinear pattern: frequent job changes during the first four post-school years reap positive wage returns for women but incur wage penalties thereafter (for a similar curvilinear pattern among men, see Yankow, 2022). Some find a long-term wage penalty for early-career temporary employment compared to the standard permanent career sequence (Fauser, 2020), while others report higher wage growth (Fuller & Stecy-Hildebrandt, 2015;Gebel, 2010;Reichenberg & Berglund, 2019), or no penalty (Padulla, 2016). Research also demonstrates the long-term penalties associated with long spells of idleness (Alon et al., 2001;Alon & Haberfeld, 2007). ...
The precarious work construct combines employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes. Yet, I argue that confining the scope of the investigation to employed individuals creates a sample selection that disguises the heterogeneous nature of employment instability. The COVID-19 skyrocketing unemployment rate provides both a compelling motivation and a unique opportunity to revisit the construct of precarious work. Using pre-COVID and COVID-19 era data of the working-age population in Israel, the results demonstrate that by pushing less stable individuals out of employment, the COVID-19 recession strengthened the negative relationship between volatility and employment opportunities and accentuated sample selection. Because the selection into employment was not random, this introduces a bias into the measurement of precarious work, one that is more severe during a recession than in a full-employment market. The discussion highlights the broader significance of this lacuna and suggests a way to hone the conceptualization and operationalization of the precarious work construct.
... Moreover, De Graaf-Zijl et al. (2011) have shown that temporary jobs do not facilitate young people to move from unemployment to regular employment, and Scherer (2005) concludes that flexible forms of employment may result in greater career instability, especially in countries with low employment protection, such Great Britain and Germany. On the other hand, Gebel (2010) reports that temporary contracts increase the risk of repeated temporary employment for new entrants in Germany, however, these effects are disappearing five years from the initial entry. ...
In the present paper, the composite indicator of early employment security introduced in Symeonaki et al. (2022) is used to measure and monitor early employment security in Greece. The composite indicator is estimated for the year 2018 using raw data drawn from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) and is compared with its values for the years 2008 and 2016 which mark the beginning and the end of the economic crisis given in Symeonaki et al. (2022). More specifically, ten indicators are estimated to refer to three different domains capturing the entire procedure of the school-to-work transition of a young individual. The domains refer to the conditions that young individuals might face when entering the labor market, i.e., the labor market conditions, the quality of jobs that are accessible to them, and the transition smoothness when transferring from education and/or training to the labor market. The composite indicator synopsizes the many facets of school-to-work transition and reveals a very slight improvement for the year 2018 when compared to the year 2016. Nonetheless, the value of the early employment security indicator a decade after the economic crisis is still behind its value in 2008, implying that the country had not fully recovered in 2018 about early job insecurity.
... Temporary employment is usually associated with economic precarity. In fact, temporary employment is less desirable than permanent employment in terms of job satisfaction (Van Aerden et al., 2016), training provided (Cutuli & Guetto, 2013;Forrier & Sels, 2003), working conditions (Amuedo-Dorantes, 2002;Kauhanen and Nätti, 2015), and wages (Boeri, 2011;Booth et al., 2002;Gash & McGinnity 2007;Gebel, 2010;Giesecke, 2009). ...
In the last three decades, the expansion of nonstandard forms of employment has involved a shift in two dimensions related to time: working time arrangements and temporary contracts, which are grouped under the umbrella term time precarity at work. Previous research has explored how atypical scheduling practices and a weak tie to the labor market affect worker’s health, well-being, family fit, and self-assessments of work-nonwork interference. However, much less is known about which specific dimensions of everyday life are affected and how these two features of time precarity interact with each other. This study analyzes how different schedule arrangements and temporary contracts associate with leisure and social time. Using data from Italy (2013–2014) and latent class analysis, four types of schedule arrangements are identified: standard, short, extended, and shift. Results from the regression analysis show that extended or shift work predicts reductions in leisure time, especially on weekends, and there is suggestive evidence that the reduction is even larger for workers with a temporary contract. Regarding social participation, extended or shift work predicts less time spent with others, and having a temporary contract or a shift schedule reduces the probability of participating in community activities.
Job seekers often rely on help from social ties in the search for employment. Yet the job search is characterized by meritocratic ideals according to which candidates should be selected based on their qualifications, not their connections. How do people justify the use of connections given the conflicting cultural logics of social capital and meritocracy? We conduct an inductive analysis of 56 interviews with young Spaniards experiencing a difficult labor market and identify a novel process of justification, situational alignment, that reconciles these conflicting logics. Respondents justified situations in which connections provided assistance as legitimate when they perceived alignment among the job seeker, job, and type of help that connections provided. Respondents deemed illegitimate the situations in which these were not aligned. These justifications allowed respondents to embrace the social capital logic’s prescription to use connections, while upholding the meritocratic principle that jobs be awarded based on qualifications. We further find that situations involving close ties were more readily justified than those involving distant others. We test this inductively derived process using a survey experiment with 1,536 young Spaniards. This study demonstrates that perceptions of merit are situated, and advances the understanding of social capital by identifying a novel process of justification that contributes to labor market inequality.
This article investigates the implications of atypical employment in couples for labour income. It develops differentiated hypotheses on consequences of atypical employment for couple income by integrating theories on labour market segmentation and partner effects on labour market outcomes. Longitudinal data from Germany (1995–2018) is used to run fixed-effects models. Couples with one partner in temporary employment do not experience income disadvantages relative to dual-permanent couples, but some disadvantage is observed for dual-temporary couples. When one or both partners work part-time, absolute joint labour income is significantly lower, but net of working hours no significant differences remain in most cases. The exception is dual part-time couples with at least one partner in marginal part-time work, who face large absolute and full-time equivalized income disadvantages. Analyses also indicate that the male partner being atypically employed affects labour income more negatively than the female partner being atypically employed.
Whereas the scarring effects of unemployment on future income, health and well-being are well-documented, little is known about its potential role on future leadership emergence and development. Using data from two cohorts of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY79 and NLSY97) and drawing from life course theory, we examine the role of employment gaps in emerging adulthood on leadership role occupancy in middle adulthood. Based on a combined sample of 9,915 respondents (NLSY79 N = 5,551; NLSY97 N= 4,567), we find strong and robust support for significant scarring effects of early-career unemployment on individuals’ future chances to occupy leadership positions in work settings. We further examine the moderating role of early life disadvantage (operationalized as family socio-economic status and childhood delinquency) and sex. Based on our main and supplementary analyses, we find weak support for these interaction effects. Our results based on complete case analyses support the role of early life disadvantage, showing that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds experience stronger negative effects on leader role occupancy due to employment gaps in emerging adulthood. They further support the moderating role of sex, showing women to experience more adverse effects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Open Access Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984324000158
In this paper, we show that incentives to convert temporary contracts into permanent ones might be less effective when the employment protection legislation associated with temporary contracts is lax. Drawing upon rich administrative data and using a difference-in-differences methodology, we estimate that workers at their first work experience hired on more flexible contracts undergo a reduction in the conversion rate to permanent employment of 6.3 percentage points after the implementation of the incentives (and of 3.2 percentage points over a year), compared to peers hired on more rigid contracts. This reduced conversion rate, which results in a 17% wage penalty even 2 years into their professional journey, points to a significant negative impact of flexible temporary jobs on the future prospects of young workers.
Most workers around the world are part of the precariat, characterized by non-permanent, informal, short-term, low-pay, low-skill, and insecure jobs. While there have been many socio-economic critiques of the negative impacts of precarity on workers, the literature has increasingly asked how precarious workers actually live their lives and how their subjectivities are produced on a daily basis. We contribute to this literature by providing a psychosocial account of the ambivalent experiences of precarious workers. We contend that the interplay of recognition and misrecognition plays a crucial role, as the vulnerable, working subject becomes entangled in a complex web of recognizability. We present insights from 104 in-depth interviews, providing a Lacanian analysis of how precarious workers develop unconscious attachments to neoliberal values that are central to the logic of precarity. Understanding this ambivalence helps us develop a more nuanced view of an ethics of precarious workers’ vulnerability.
Does entering the labour market via precarious employment have a long-term scarring effect on one’s career? Prior research proposes diverse arguments, but firm conclusions remain elusive. Using panel data from Hong Kong, this study rekindles this debate by revealing the long-lasting effect of first job precarity on workers’ subsequent career prospects. A comprehensive measure of precarious employment is constructed to simultaneously account for employment status, contractual status and occupational status, and random effects models are used to test the scarring effect of first job precarity on subsequent monthly income, job satisfaction and fringe benefits. It is also observed that macroeconomic situations, particularly periods of economic crisis, have a detrimental effect on entry into precarious employment. Importantly, the results show the substantial negative consequences of initial precarious employment, highlighting the adverse impact of economic crises on first job precarity and the subsequent scarring effect on career prospects.
This study investigates differences in the causal effect of fixed-term contracts on affective job insecurity by gender and household context in Germany. Research shows that workers in fixed-term employment are more unsettled about their job security than are permanent employees. We contribute to the literature on subjective job insecurity by explicitly modelling the causal effect of fixed-term employment and by examining how women and men differ in this effect. We argue that gender differences in the labour market positions and a gendered division of labour in the household account for gender differences in the subjective vulnerability to fixed-term employment. We apply linear fixed effect probability models based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with a sample of employees aged between 20 and 45 years. Results show that a fixed-term contract doubles the probability of big job worries compared to a permanent contract. Women are substantially more unsettled by fixed-term contracts than men across all household types. These gender differences cannot be explained by unfavourable labour market positions of women. Fixed-term employment thus seems to add to existing gender inequalities on the labour market.
In Europe, the consequences of temporary employment are at the centre of a social policy debate about whether there is a trade-off between efficiency and equity when deregulating labour markets. However, despite decades of research, there is confusion about the consequences of temporary employment on wage and career mobility. It is often stated that the consequences are ‘mixed’. We review the literature with a focus on synthesizing the evidence and analysing the theories. Our review shows that we know a lot more than is often understood about the consequences of temporary employment on wage and career mobility. We create clarity by organizing the evidence by geographic region, demographic group and reference group. While outcomes vary across these factors, there is less variation within these factors. At the same time, we know a lot less than is often understood about the mechanisms through which temporary employment affects mobility. Some common theories are not well specified in their application to temporary employment. We create new opportunities for development in the field by increasing the scope of the debate about some questions and decreasing the scope of the debate about other questions.
This paper addresses the effects of employment protection legislation on job mobility and status attainment among young people entering the labour market. Since strict employment protection legislation (EPL) reduces labour market turnover and results in low vacancy levels, the paper argues that stringent EPL reduces market entrants' chances of both job and upward status mobility, and thus Xattens observed status-experience profiles. Labour Force Survey data for 11 European countries support these assertions: estimates from multilevel continuous state space hazard models show both job and status mobility to be negatively related to strict employment protection legislation. Hence, any positive EPL eVects from the higher stability of young peoples' initial jobs are dominated by the system-level effect of strict EPL reducing opportunity levels in external labour markets. Upward mobility chances are found to be markedly reduced in the high-skill segment of the labour market and among market entrants in unfavourable initial job matches. In total, cross-national variation in EPL strictness is estimated to account for about one-third of cross-national differences in mobility rates and even 50% of cross-national differences in terms of status returns to job mobility.
This article addresses the question of whether the first job functions as a ‘stepping stone’ or as a ‘trap’. It does so by using individual longitudinal data to estimate the consequences on future occupational attainment of entry into the labour market via (a) ‘under-qualified’ jobs or (b) via temporary contracts. A cross-national comparison of West Germany, Great Britain and Italy allows assessment of the impact of different labour market structures on this allocation process. With regard to ‘under-qualified’ positions, the findings are not consistent with the stepping-stone hypothesis but provide some support for the entrapment hypothesis. Despite the greater mobility chances of over-qualified workers, the initial disadvantage associated with status-inadequate jobs is not fully overcome during their future careers. The article shows, however, that the negative effects are not due to the mismatch as such but rather to the relatively lower level positions. These effects are mediated by the national labour market structure, with the British flexible model providing the best chances of making up for initial disadvantages, and the more tightly regulated and segmented markets in Germany and Italy leading to stronger entrapment in lower status positions. No negative effects of the type of contract are found for later occupational positions in any of the countries.
In the intense debate around questions related to labour market flexibility one of the contested issues has been the relationship between temporary work and unemployment. Temporary work has here been regarded either as a precursor to recurrent unemployment, or as an entry port to stable employment. Little is however known about actual mobility patterns, including whether or not temporary employment can act as a stepping stone out of unemployment. Using a sample of initially unemployed, this is here examined through an analysis of the relationship between temporary employment during a one-year observation period and employment and unemployment during a subsequent twelve-month long follow-up period. The results evince the great overall vulnerability of the unemployed, but also that the permanent and temporary jobs obtained by unemployed differ relatively little in the employment security they offer. This suggests that the type of employment contract is of minor importance for the long-term employment prospects of the unemployed. This holds for women as well as for men, contradicting some earlier conjectures about gender specific mobility patterns.
The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two- dimensional plot.
Non-standard (alternatively, flexible) employment has become common in the Netherlands, and viewed as an important weapon for combating youth unem-ployment. However, if such jobs are 'bad', non-standard employment becomes a matter of concern. In addition, non-standard employment may hit the least quali-fied, excluding them from the primary segment of the labour market, where 'good' jobs are found.We first examine whether less-educated school leavers more often end up in a job with a non-standard employment contract than the higher edu-cated. Then, we investigate the effect of having a non-standard employment con-tract on job advantages in terms of wages.The data come from three large-scale Dutch school leaver surveys as held in 2001. The results show: (a) less-educated school leavers indeed are more likely to have a non-standard contract than more highly educated ones, while (b) those in non-standard employment earn less in their jobs. A substantial part of these differences can be ascribed to the segment of the labour market in which school leavers work.
This article outlines how current sociology constructs life courses. First, a set of general heuristics is provided. Second, the development of life course sociology over the last 50 years is traced as an intellectual process whereby the life course has emerged as an analytical construct in addition to such concepts as human develop-ment, biography, and aging. A differential life course sociology has gradually devel-oped in which contexts are specified according to time and place. Third, these differential constraints operating on life courses are illustrated from the perspective of 2 research areas. One perspective introduces historical periods as a sequence of regimes that regulate life courses. Another perspective looks at cross-national dif-ferences and especially focuses on institutions as the mechanisms by which life courses are shaped. The article concludes with reflections about the relation between the variable social contexts of life courses and human development. In recent years, there has been a marked shift in the way human development and human life courses are being perceived. Infants and children are seen as produc-ers, or at least as coproducers, of their own development (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). Parent–child relationships and socialization processes are cate-gorized much less as one-way streets where parents and other socialization agents imprint and impose their values and habits on children and adolescents but rather as areas of mutual interaction where it remains open who influences whom more (Krappmann, 2001; Kreppner, 1999). The old idea that teachers effectively trans-fer knowledge and character has given way to unending reports about unruly classes and resistant pupils. Sociologists have newly celebrated the significance of human agency (Giddens, 1984) and the individualization of life decisions and RESEARCH IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, 1(3), 161–187 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
This paper seeks to reveal whether fixed-term contracts are the new European inequality and does so in a comparative analysis of two countries typically regarded as eurosclerotic: West Germany and France. We compare the wages, wage growth and labour market outcomes of fixed-term contract workers relative to a matched sample of permanent workers with similar characteristics. Using seven waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) we find evidence of wage penalties, increased exposure to unemployment and repeat spells of fixed-term employment. However, these tendencies vary significantly by country and by gender. The main finding of this paper is the extent to which fixed-term contract employment is of considerable disadvantage for French women. This is important, as previous research on female employment in the UK and in West Germany (; ), two countries with intermittent female employment, did not find evidence of fixed-term worker disadvantage. Our findings, however, suggest that in countries where female employment tends to be full-time and continuous, the introduction of fixed-term contracts challenges the existing gender contract.
In this paper, we demonstrate that sorting considerations alone generate steep wage-tenure profiles, high turnover rates of newly hired workers, an increase in the variance of wages with seniority, and mandatory retirement rules. We show that `excessive monitoring' is sometimes necessary to deter applications from low productivity workers. We derive conditions under which firms randomly test workers, as well as conditions under which firms retain some workers that fail its test. Finally, we show that competition for workers can lower total output.
This article looks at the career effects of different entries into the Dutch labour market: as unemployed, non-standard or permanent worker. Using the bridge versus trap analogy, it is investigated whether or not a ‘bad’ career start will have longterm negative consequences.To do this, event history analysis is used. The results show that non-standard work has no negative consequences with respect to later career unemployment or upward and downward mobility. However, certain negative effects are associated with unemployment at the career start. Moreover, this effect is larger when the duration of the period of unemployment is longer. Several other hypotheses – about macro-economic effects and about the effects for groups with a weak labour market position – are refuted. Overall, the data show that early career unemployment can work as a trap, but that early career non-standard work can work as a stepping stone towards a better labour market position.
This fascinating comparative study presents the latest research into the value of qualifications for the attainment of first job, and in securing employment. A team of some of the world’s leading scholars in the field examine the ways in which educational qualifications affect the occupational outcomes of men and women in thirteen countries. The book features chapters on each of these countries, together with a lead chapter which integrates them, and analyses them comparatively. The authors present a wealth of rich and detailed information on educational institutions in these various countries, as well as reports on rigorous statistical analyses of the associations between qualifications and occupations. The data reveals marked differences between countries in how education shapes occupational attainment, and indicates that these differences are related, in very systematic ways, to the institutional characteristics of school systems. The book offers a range of insightful policy-oriented observations, for example that vocational education is valuable in countries where training is occupationally specific, but is of little value where the curricula are general in content.
In the intense debate around questions related to labour market flexibility one of the contested issues has been the relationship between temporary work and unemployment. Temporary work has here been regarded either as a precursor to recurrent unemployment, or as an entry port to stable employment. Little is however known about actual mobility patterns, including whether or not temporary employment can act as a stepping stone out of unemployment. Using a sample of initially unemployed, this is here examined through an analysis of the relationship between temporary employment during a one-year observation period and employment and unemployment during a subsequent twelve-month long follow-up period. The results evince the great overall vulnerability of the unemployed, but also that the permanent and temporary jobs obtained by unemployed differ relatively little in the employment security they offer. This suggests that the type of employment contract is of minor importance for the long-term employment prospects of the unemployed. This holds for women as well as for men, contradicting some earlier conjectures about gender specific mobility patterns.
Amid a lively debate on the consequences of fixed-term contracts, this paper examines the wages of fixed-term employees in East and West Germany using German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) data from the late 1990s. Previous research using ordinary least squares regression (OLS) has found that fixed-term workers earn significantly less than their permanent counterparts (Schömann & Kruppe, 1993, 1994). Compared to simple OLS estimates, using a fixed-effects model reduces wage differentials between permanent and fixed-term workers. This suggests that fixed-term workers differ in unobservable ways from permanent workers. Moreover, on average fixed-term employees are found to experience significantly higher wage growth than workers on permanent contracts, indicating that at least some of the fixed-term workers are able to “catch up.”
Education is a crucial determinant of people’s life chances, and it particularly affects the integration of youth into labour markets. The article shows how different kinds and levels of education shape the access of young people to jobs of varying advantage and the smoothness of the transition from school to work. It elaborates the common patterns in the relationship between education and early career labour market outcomes and investigates - especially for EU member countries - how varying institutional arrangements in the educational systems and in the regulation of labour markets lead to varying integration outcomes.
As the counterfactual model of causality has increased in popularity, sociologists have returned to matching as a research methodology. In this article, advances over the past two decades in matching estimators are explained, and the practical limitations of matching techniques are emphasized. The authors introduce matching methods by focusing first on ideal scenarios in which stratification and weighting procedures warrant causal inference. Then, they discuss how matching is often undertaken in practice, offering an overview of the most prominent data analysis routines. With four hypothetical examples, they demonstrate how the assumptions behind matching estimators often break down in practice. Even so, the authors argue that matching techniques can be used effectively to strengthen the prosecution of causal questions in sociology.
Current discussion in Europe focuses closely on (partial) labour market de-regulation as a means to combat constantly high
(youth) unemployment. The paper argues that this perspective is too narrow and fails to account for existing national institutional
differences. It suggests that the focus should instead be on a combination of different institutional settings, rather than
on single aspects. This general issue is approached by investigating the labour market entry process and its determinants
in three European countries: West Germany, Italy and Great Britain. These countries differ substantially in their combinations
of relevant institutional aspects: labour market regulation, and the education and training systems. Consequently, they display
three distinct patterns of labour market entry. Great Britain is characterised by rapid but rather unstable market entry,
whilst market entry in Germany is also rapid but relatively stable. The main problems exist in Italy, where first job searches
are very protracted. However, once jobs have been found, they are rather stable. Despite substantial deregulation efforts
in Italy over the past decade, this situation has changed little.
In this paper we examine the impact of temporary work on two dimensions of social inequality: income and career mobility. Additionally, we are taking a comparative perspective on this subject by comparing Germany and the UK. To investigate the effects of temporary work we use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Study on non-self-employed respondents. The results show that temporary work does influence the system of social inequality: we found wage penalties and an increased probability of severe negative effects on the working careers of temporarily employed persons in both countries (net of education, age, and a variety of other covariates). Thus we can conclude that temporary employment represents a substantial socio-economic risk for employees. Most importantly, this holds true for both the German and the British case, two quite distinct labour market regimes.
In recent years a “unified theory” has emerged out of labor economics, which argues that a combination of “macroeconomic shocks” and flexible labor market institutions in the U.S. has produced strong upward trends in wage inequality, while these same shocks have produced high unemployment and low employment growth in Europe as a side effect of the wage stability preserved by that continent's rigid labor market institutions. This paper takes issue with the common view that inequality trends are best explained by a model of stable institutions interacting with changing macroeconomic forces. It argues that European institutions in fact have changed, and that institutional changes which were triggered by the broader macroeconomic forces have affected the form as well as the size of inequality trends. While the U.S. has experienced rising strong skill-based wage inequality, institutional change in France has produced an upward trend in the density of insecure jobs and an increased concentration of low-skill workers in insecure jobs. These results challenge the view that low employment rates is the sole mechanism through which European labor markets have absorbed asymmetric shocks to their demand for labor.
This article analyses the transitions of temporary workers to the standard employment contract and to unemployment. Adopting a comparative framework in an attempt to identify whether labour market institutions parameterize outcomes, four countries with different forms of market structuration are analysed: France, West Germany, Denmark, and the UK. Using the European Community Household Panel survey (ECHP), spanning a period from 1995 to 2001, temporary workers’ transitions are investigated using event history analysis techniques. This article establishes higher rates of transition to permanent employment than to unemployment for most temporary workers, though strong between-country differences are found.
We argue that the effects of a partial reform of employment protection by allowing firms to hire workers on fixed-term contracts may be perverse. The main effect may be high turnover in entry-level jobs, leading to higher, not lower, unemployment. Even if unemployment falls, workers may be worse off, going through many spells of unemployment and entry-level jobs, before obtaining a regular job. Considering French data for young workers since the early 1980s, we conclude that the reforms have substantially increased turnover, without a substantial reduction in unemployment duration. If anything, the effect on their welfare appears to have been negative.
The propensity score is the conditional probability of assignment to a particular treatment given a vector of observed covariates. Both large and small sample theory show that adjustment for the scalar propensity score is sufficient to remove bias due to all observed covariates. Applications include: (i) matched sampling on the univariate propensity score, which is a generalization of discriminant matching, (ii) multivariate adjustment by subclassification on the propensity score where the same subclasses are used to estimate treatment effects for all outcome variables and in all subpopulations, and (iii) visual representation of multivariate covariance adjustment by a two-dimensional plot.
Incl. bibl., index.
The paper investigates whether increased labour‐market flexibility leads to a reinforcement of the existing segmentation of the labour market or to a dismantling of barriers in the labour market. Using spell data (employment and unemployment periods) from the German Socio‐economic Panel (GSOEP, time period: 1984–1999), both determinants of temporary employment and their consequences (e.g. renewed temporary employment, unemployment) are investigated with the help of random‐effects logit‐models. The results show that respondents' characteristics (amount and type of human capital, previous periods of unemployment), structural variables (industry, firm size), and occupational characteristics (position, marginal employment) influence the risk of finding a temporary job. Furthermore it is shown that fixed‐term contracts increase the risk of finding another temporary job or of becoming unemployed after termination of the contract. These results show that fixed‐term contracts are primarily part of the secondary labour market, and that they have negative consequences for the employees in this segment. At the same time fixed‐term contracts can be seen as providing opportunities in that they are at least an alternative to unemployment. Therefore, an overly simplistic evaluation of temporary employment is to be avoided.
Fixed-term contracts in Europe have recently become the subject of both policy and research interest, seen as particularly
relevant in the transition from school to work. Some commentators argue that fixed-term contracts have an integrative function
in the transition from school to work, providing a ‘bridge’ to the labour market. A contrasting perspective is that they hinder
successful integration into the labour market by leading to a repeating cycle of fixed-term jobs and unemployment. We investigate
this issue in Germany, a country with a regulated labour market and a ‘co-ordinated’ transition from education to work. Using
life history data we consider who gets a fixed-term contract at the beginning of working life in Germany and how this affects
their subsequent labour market career. Our first key finding is that fixed-term contracts are found among those for whom the
school-to-work transition is not so co-ordinated, including both high-skilled and low-skilled labour market entrants. Our second finding is that, after five years, the unemployment rates
of those who started with fixed-term contracts and those who started with permanent contracts converge. Beginning working
life with a fixed-term contract does not clearly signal a ‘bad start’ in Germany.
Dual labor market theory is an attempt to understand observed variation in wages and job quality. The theory argues that market processes tend to produce "primary" jobs characterized by high wages and longjob tenure, and "contingent" (or "secondary") jobs that typically offer low wages and short tenure. The key feature distinguishing dual labor market theory from such alternative explanations as human capital theory or the theory of compensating wage differentials, is the nature of the labor market equilibrium. In dual labor market theory, equilibrium is characterized by an excess supply of qualified workers to primary jobs. Mobility between contingent and primary jobs will therefore be limited, and "good" workers may be stuck in "bad" jobs.
During the last decades most industrialised countries have experienced a massive educational expansion. Corresponding to this development there has been an increase of female employment which is, however, to a large extent part-time. At the same time, the attempts of firms to achieve more employment flexibility - facilitated by government intervention to deregulate the labor market - has contributed to the growth of precarious jobs, such as, fixed-term, (certain types of) part-time jobs and self-employment. This has been true in particular for the United Kingdom.In this paper we examine the relationships between the growth of precarious employment, the general educational expansion and gender in Germany and the United Kingdom. Our first question is to what extent education shields from insecure employment. The empirical analysis focuses on effects of both general and vocational education and compares these effects between countries. Based on national differences in the educational systems, we expect a relatively smaller influence of education on the likelihood of precarious employment in the UK where the educational system is less restrictive - that is, less rigidly stratified - than in Germany. Second, we try to better understand the link between gender and precarious employment by looking at its embeddedness within the national institutional arrangements. We expect that the economic interests of firms to create precarious jobs are more or less closely linked to the national gender regimes. Given the stronger emphasis on the male-breadwinner model we expect that the female bias in precarious employment is relatively stronger in Germany than in the United Kingdom. Data from the German Microcensus (1982, 1996) and the British Labor Force Survey (1984, 1996) are used for the empirical analyses
This article uses 1994-8 International Adult Literacy Survey microdata for Canada, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US to study the impact of employment protection laws (EPL) on joblessness and temporary employment by demographic group. More stringent EPL raises relative non-employment rates for youth, immigrants, and, possibly, women, controlling for demographic variables and country dummies. For wage and salary workers, EPL raises the relative incidence of temporary employment for the low skilled, youth, native women, and especially immigrant women. These effects are often stronger in countries with higher levels of collective bargaining coverage. Copyright 2007 The Author(s). Journal compilation Royal Economic Society 2007.
Copyright 2002 Royal Economic Society
Germany and Spain are typically regarded as 'rigid' economies, yet both have had different experiences of fixed-term jobs. Using quantile regression we find that in West Germany the earnings of permanent and fixed-term workers are most similar among high earners and most dissimilar among low earners. In Spain, the wage penalty shows little variation across the distribution of wages. This pattern was also found for different occupational groups, although there are clear differences in the absolute wage penalty across occupations. In conclusion we caution against generalizing findings from Spain to other 'rigid' European labour markets. Copyright 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007.
Temporary Jobs: Stepping Stones or Dead Ends? In Britain about 7% of male employees and 10% of female employees are in temporary jobs. In contrast to much of continental Europe, this proportion has been relatively stable over the 1990s. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we find that temporary workers report lower levels of job satisfaction, receive less work-related training, and are less well-paid than their counterparts in permanent employment. However, there is evidence that fixed-term contracts are a stepping stone to permanent work. Women (but not men) who start in fixed-term employment and move to permanent jobs fully catch up to those who start in permanent jobs. JEL Classification: J21, J30, J63 Keywords: Temporary jobs, fixed term contracts, individual unobserved heterogeneity, jobspecific effects Alison Booth Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) University of Essex Colchester CO4 3 SQ UK Tel: +44 0 1206 873 789 Fax: +44 0 1206 873 151 Em...
Young Workers, Globalisation, and the Labour Market
- H.-P Blossfeld
- S Buchholz
- E Bukodi
- K Kurz
Blossfeld, H.-P., Buchholz, S., Bukodi, E. and Kurz, K. (2008) Young Workers,
Globalisation, and the Labour Market. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Why Deregulate Labour Markets
- G Esping-Andersen
- M Regini
Esping-Andersen, G. and Regini, M. (2000) Why Deregulate Labour Markets?
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matching Estimators of Causal Effects: Prospects and Pitfalls in Theory and Practice
- S L Morgan
- D J Harding
Morgan, S.L. and Harding, D.J. (2006) 'Matching Estimators of Causal Effects:
Prospects and Pitfalls in Theory and Practice', Sociological Methods and
Research 35(1): 3-60.